"College Boys and Boozers": <i>Vermont's Northern League and William Clarence Matthews</i>

Abstract

The colored player in league ball in 1905 William Clarence Matthews, and that season in Vermont's Northern League his only season in professional baseball.1 At Harvard, had won fame for his baseball exploits, becoming one of the nation's best college players on the foremost college nine in the country. In the summer of 1905, while playing in Vermont, became the focus of additional national attention when it reported by a Boston newspaper that would soon be breaking the color barrier in major league baseball by joining Fred Tenney's Boston Nationals.Matthews' life is an absorbing document of the African American experience from the end of Reconstruction to the Depression. In his lifetime, Matthews intimately associated with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, and attended the Harvard College of W.E.B. DuBois, William Munroe Trotter, and William Henry Lewis. When died in 1928, at age 50, more than 1,500 mourners gathered at his funeral in Boston; President Coolidge and Attorney General John Sargent sent telegrams of consolation and celebration of his life. The Evening Transcript, Boston's foremost white newspaper, called him a leader of his race.I have written more extensively about Matthews' life elsewhere.2 This essay largely focuses on the context of his only foray into professional baseball, the Northern League of Vermont, and describes in detail the organization of that league and the players and controversies that marked this extraordinary baseball enterprise in the summer of Matthews' rumored breakthrough.Matthews forced to play in an outlaw league. The organized minor leagues played under the so-called National and abided by the same Gentleman's Agreement that barred blacks from the majors. Vermont's Northern League a league that operated 1901-1906. The Burlington team that Matthews joined the defending champ and the scourge of the league. Burlington's owner, wealthy senator George Whitney, and his right-hand man, Vermonter Willard Doc Hazleton, had put together a formidable outfit of veterans and recent college players for the 1905 season.Unlike so many college boys, Matthews had eschewed professional baseball in the summers in order to retain his amateur eligibility at Harvard. As a black man, certainly could not have played under an alias and escaped detection. An article in McClure's Magazine in June 1905, identifying Matthews as Harvard's Best Player, brought him national attention.3 Muckraker Henry Beach Needham praised Matthews extravagantly in McClure's for his decision to play college sports and work his way through school rather than subsidize his education through summer ball. For seven seasons could have earned much money by playing with semi-professional teams, Needham observed, this has refused to do.Matthews missed Burlington's first five games and then appeared on July 2 against Plattsburgh. His first night in uniform must have introduced second thoughts about his decision to play in Vermont: The boat ride across Lake Champlain to Plattsburgh most hazardous ... with waves washing the gunwales on every roll of the little steamer, as the Burlington Free Press reported the next day. Life preservers were donned and every preparation made for the possible sinking of the boat.4 He survived that scare, but this close call perhaps a harbinger of the season to come. He showed up fast in the pregame practice and was liberally applauded by Burlington fans. Once the game started, the first Plattsburgh hitter upbounded the ball to Matthews and he fairly ate it up.5 This first game proved anticlimactic, called on account of rain with the score tied 0-0. Burlington fans would have to endure an off-day before catching Matthews again in a spectacular home-and-home doubleheader with deadly rival Rutland on the Fourth of July.6 In those games, played in a festive atmosphere before thousands of fans traveling by train the 70 miles between cities, would live up to his billing. …